Electronic communications such as email and instant messages are commonly used for personal and business communications. Unsolicited commercial electronic messages and other unwanted messages can inundate users. Such messages are commonly referred to as spam.
In many cases, measures taken to mitigate the spam problem can end up inadvertently filtering out legitimate email messages. Such messages may be summarily deleted, or routed to a “junk” folder that a user may check infrequently, or not at all. This can cause problems because a user may never see an important message.
It would be useful to have improved techniques for electronic messaging, and for mitigating the adverse effects of spam, and side effects of the countermeasures thereto.